Ushabti
by Albino Magpie
Summary: In the dead silence of a tomb, the thief finds a hundred servants and ponders the meaning of freedom. Something of a character study.


**A/N: **I just noticed that I haven't written one measly story for my favorite character of all time ever - Thief Bakura. So you get something like a character study, set during a raid early in his career, a few years before the events in the series. Ushabti are small clay figurines that were buried alongside dead pharaoes to act as their servants in the afterlife. Also, Egyptians believed the heart, not the brain, to be the seat of consciousness.

ooooo

The silence of the dead is profound. It is long past nightfall, so far that sunrise is now closer, and were he outside, he would see the first grayish-pink light starting to colour the edge of the world.

But he is not outside, and the light stays hidden to him, as he has progressed far enough, along bends and steps and crawling through tunnels on his hands and knees, into the heart of a late king's tomb. The deceased god-king has been so for a few men's ages, and if he was good king, no-one truly knows. Could Bakura, once an ordinary child but now something else, read beyond the few symbols that he is able to puzzle out with difficulty, he would see the inscriptions tell of how good a king this son of Ra was, how worthy he was and strong, and how he made the country prosper. Whether this is true, only the dead man in his bed of gold and cyprus wood knows, but he will not speak of it.

Bakura wedges the tarred, burning piece of wood between two stones and looks around in the inner sanctuary. Later kings have been buried in small, hidden chambers, while mountains of wealth were stacked before those, to confuse thieves with greed and lead them away from the god-king's resting place and into waiting traps. Whoever constructed this tomb has not gotten as far. The king is buried next to and surrounded by his riches, the things that he will need in the life past this one.

He pulls the black-dyed rag from his head, necessary for on moon-bright nights like this, his hair, though now matted and dirty, stands out as if someone had stolen some of the moon's light and spun it, giving him away no matter how stealthily he moves.

Were this the mid-night in a place of the living, there wouldn't be this deep, deep silence, there would be the sounds of those wealthy or careless enough to still drink themselves stupid on beer or date-wine, the sounds of animals in their stables, of the last people moving on the streets and some in their homes. Even, to ears as trained as his, the slow breathing of sleepers and the faster breathing of those who lie together. Bakura smiles at that tawdry thought, and wonders if it is more blasphemy to think of things like this in the supposedly blessed silence of the tomb.

He decides to try out that theory, and swears, loudly, like a drunken man searching for a fight with another man or a tryst with an easy woman. It shatters the dead-silence of the tomb, and though he is not drunken on wine – it would be suicide to drink before a raid – he feels drunken on blasphemy. Bakura wonders if the gods will stop his heart for this mockery, but it beats all the faster. He would curse the king's name, but he does not know it, and neither does he care. The common man vanishes like water in the sun's light, as soon as the last who has spoken his name with love in their voice is dead as well. But this king, if he deserves love or not, is remembered and cared for no matter how long ago he faded.

It is hard work to collect all this gold, sun-bright in the torchlight, wrapping it with rags so it will not chime, and stacking it together in a grain-sack. Bakura marvels at the gold and lazuli and jewels, enough to feed a city or an army, enough to buy a city. There are twin voices of greed and contempt in his heart, and the small soft voice belonging to neither, which asks,

_what is more honest, what more despicable? To steal the gold from one dead king who had enough in his lifetime, or to take it from your own country, from people who have to fight to eat? _

This has kept the guilt at bay, oftentimes, though often it has also fed the guilt. It's the deepest voice, like a clear cool well, but barely ever will he acknowledge it.

The last thing that Bakura does is go towards the coffin. It is covered with leaf-thin gold, resting on a slab of stone, and is decadent as everything this place is, more decadent than the most sin-steeped part of any village, because living men at least enjoy the treasure piled at their feet. There's even jars of wine around, probably transformed into something much more heady and dangerous by years and years of stewing. As if the god-king really needed so much!

But the worst isn't the gold and neither the wine, nor the food and furniture and games and trivialities. The worst is stacked and piled around the coffin, on the stone slab, and below it on the floor. Ushabti. The king's silent servants, made of clay and burnished and painted.

Tens and hundreds of them, all the same shape, all with but one purpose.

To serve the dead king in the afterlife, when he is called to do work. To work on the fields and in the house and whereever else, in the king's name.

Bakura steps over them carefully, heart full of disdain. This is a king's life and a king's death, not having to work, not having to lift one single finger. The coffin opens more easily than he thought – in the times past, the men planning the burials seemed to have been fools.

There are charms and amulets and jewels piled around the dead king, and he lifts them out one by one, always half-expecting his fingers to blister with with curses of times gone by.

The mask over the king's face he takes last – it is all one has to know, really.

It's made of gold and jewels and fashioned to look like a handsome man's face – serene, calm, strong and trustworthy. But the ugliness of death that not even the embalmer's arts can hide is below it. This is how the kings are, and how all nobles are. They cover their decay with a mask of wealth.

Bakura snorts in derision. His eyes flicker over to the still-burning torch, and then they come to rest on the ushabti, who are silent and cold and made only to serve, for eternity. For a long moment, he contemplates to take up the torch and set fire to the mummified king. The dry flesh and bandages and resin would doubtlessly burn fast, faster than any living man(living men burn slowly, he can attest to that) and the cyprus wood would burn, too, leaving only a layer goldleaf behind.

But what would that make of the ushabti? They'd be left in the afterlife without a master, but still they'd have to work.

They have no purpose but to work, and with their purpose gone, no doubt they would fade as well.

Better to be faded than to be an eternal slave, Bakura thinks. Better to be free.

He picks up one ushabti, which looks like all the other, in the shape of a small man, glazed blue. The lips are shaped eternally closed. Cursed with silence and servitude.

Bakura spits out another curse from the bottom of his half-poisoned heart and smashes the figurine on the floor.

Now it is dead, and now it is free. He mouths and apology and the shred of a prayer, for though he mistrusts the gods in the way they lay power only into highborn hands, he still hasn't quite forgotten how to hope. Picking up a rock, he smashes them, shattering the clay, rendering the servants free of their position. He imagines, in the afterlife, the king's servants fading, one by one, and he imagines the king's face as he realises that now he will have to cultivate his own fields and cook his own meals and clean his own house and wipe his own ass.

Finally he is finished, and the sanctuary's floor is covered in shards of clay.

„Whatever happens to your spirits now, they will never have to serve again." he says quietly, heart heavy and bitter at the thought of spirits made for nothing but servitude. Then he picks up his loot and leaves the way he came.

After he has left the valley by way of a small, hidden path, he finds his horse waiting where he has tethered it.

Riding away to find a place to hide and an untrustworthy(to the general people's eyes) and trustworthy(to his eyes) merchant to sell part of his loot to, he finds himself thinking, the thoughts in his heart racing like the hooves of his horse.

Even if the kings are children of the gods, which he doubts, how can they be true kings? How can one hope to be noble and righteous when he has never sunken as low as the common man? How can one languish in luxury and truly enjoy it when he has never known the sting of famine?

How can a man recognise beauty if he has never seen decay?

The stolen gold heavy on his back, Bakura thinks that he will be a king, as he knows all these things. He will claim the desert, not by birth-right, but by riding across it and seeing its cruel beauty. He will be the king with miscreants and thugs as subjects, and raucousness and noise as his rites.

He will rise to be the first king who has crawled on his knees.


End file.
